Matthew Harry
Tax Office, Llanishen, Cardiff, 2022
The dense shadow of a moribund building looms over neat rows of semi-detached houses in a north Cardiff suburb. The polite suburban landscape is being encroached upon by a slash of black, subtracting light and detail from the photograph. The shadow is cast by the 17-storey tax office, now demolished. Like taxes themselves, the shadow is ever-present and banal, an inescapable fact of daily life that shapes everything without announcing itself.
Ty Glas literally cast its shadow over the houses that surrounded it. It was a permanent reminder of the extraction of wealth from a country that has, throughout its history, seen its riches sent into the hands of a power over the border to be managed. In 2015, HMRC announced it was to shut more than 100 offices across the UK and rationalise them into 13 regional bases. Wrexham, Swansea, Porthmadog, Carmarthen, Pembroke Dock, Merthyr Tydfil, Colwyn Bay, and the Llanishen office were all to shut their doors. Services were centralised in a 3,500-person operation in Cardiff. Much like the castles of Edward I, this fiscal 'ring of iron' was defunct.
Completed in 1969 and opened officially by Queen Elizabeth II in 1973, the 73-metre-tall building was, until 2005, the tallest building in Cardiff. Eighteen storeys of bureaucracy loomed large over a locale typified by gentle suburban density and politeness. It was, due to the unrealised Centre Plan 70, a monumental planning quirk. Even the Pevsner guide to the area simply refers to "Two massive slabs, one of eighteen stories, the other of ten. Their towering presence is felt over much of north Cardiff."
After years of standing mute, the building's demolition was approved in 2022. No one protested, and the 20th Century Society didn't petition for listing. Ty Glas emptied, then slowly disappeared. This giant tax office was, in some way, a spectacular expression of banality, a polite attempt at modernism for a future that was never going to arrive. The shadow remained longer than the building itself.
Matthew Harry is a documentary photographer working / living in south Wales.
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